- Sat Mar 07, 2020 12:06:26 pm
#21786
Eric -
1.Were you really in charge or was it all just illusion?
The thing about being in charge in this game is that it tends to get you voted out. Unless you are playing with complete idiots, eventually more outspoken types of power--great power and control of challenges, for instance, or amazing social skills--will get you noticed and targeted. I understand your frustration, that three players who played much more under the radar games have made it to the end, while players like you, who were extremely dominant in challenges, and Reem, who was unparalleled in her social game, were sent to jury.
Do I believe that I was really in charge, or that it was instead all an illusion of grandeur in my own mind? I don’t believe either of those things. I should have been a bigger target than I was; I had survived being on the wrong side of the vote pre-swap, had a 3 person alliance with Lauren and Aurora still waiting for me come merge, helped vote out someone I had a final two deal with in order to further my own game, had another 4 person alliance from 2raku with Charlie, Reem, and Gillian, and didn’t receive any votes at all until the final 5 (final 6 vote was redacted). My power wasn’t a heavy-handed one; it was a quiet one, the power of balance, of knowing when to push my ideas forward and when to take a step back and let others lead. The balance of knowing when to stick with the people I was close to and when to change direction to further my own game. I think that was one of the main differences between me and you, Eric, other than your obvious skill at challenges. You and Chris were extremely loyal to one another, even when it was to both of your detriments. When I was in similar situations--namely with Aurora and Reem--I made the choice to vote them out and not play my idol on them, respectively. It was actions like those that helped manage my threat level, and it is because of actions like those that I sit here today, in the final three.
2.What was the move that you engineered from beginning to end, that worked as you planned it?
I spoke about it in my opening statements too, but I take a lot of credit for the Matty vote-off. I won’t take complete credit, because Matty obviously had a huge hand in his own undoing, but the seeds I had started planting with people way back during the Aurora eviction were, I believe, very important in the process of changing peoples’ minds about Matty. He was so ingrained in peoples’ daily lives here that it was a hard sell, and required days of dedicated work from me. As I have already talked about, I created fake group chats to stir things up and open lines of communication between Chris, Randy and myself. I made sure that I was the first person to tell Randy about the chat rooms, and commented that Matty blamed him for their creation. People can say they suspected me all they want, but at the end of the day when that tribal happened, it became clear that Matty and Randy certainly blamed each other, which was the intent. I was able to solidify Matty’s unanimous eviction through a spread of information, partially true and partially fabricated, and was able to gain a new ally in Randy because of it, which became incredibly important for my game down the road.
